God in Ruins

Published Thursday 6 December 2007 at 13:05 by Alistair Smith

When the Royal Shakespeare Company gave playwright Anthony Neilson a group of 11 actors and the opportunity to do what he liked with them, it probably knew it was taking something of a gamble.

God in Ruins, the end result of the RSC and Neilson’s calculated risk, is a mess.

At times, though, it is a glorious mess, bursting with so much creativity and so many ideas that it almost makes you dizzy.

Broadly speaking, the work takes the form of a modern day Christmas Carol, with Scrooge transformed into Brian Wilkins, a bitter, sarcastic and alcoholic TV producer of reality shows such as Chimp Monastery, who has failed his wife and child and is suffering from an identity crisis.

On Christmas Eve, Brian’s redemptive journey, such as it is, sees him visited by his father and Scrooge himself - a character from a screenplay Brian is writing - and eventually takes him into the virtual world of Second Life in search of his daughter.

The play pulls in several directions at once, addressing problems of identity, different layers of reality (virtual worlds, scripts, ghosts, memory, alcoholic stupor), and the wreck of humanity that Brian has become - a god in ruins.

Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t always work as a cohesive whole and sometimes one longs for a little more structure to reign in Neilson’s ideas. That said, it is finely performed by the ensemble - especially the superb Brian Doherty - and it will certainly be the most surreal, foul-mouthed and nasty Christmas story you’ll see this year.